Notebook refresh

I have not made a blog post in some time due to a lot of travelling, studies and… wait for it… my laptop finally coming to the end of its electronic life! Yes, during the week preceeding the start of a new academic year at university, my 7-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1800-S204 notebook was showing signs of hard disk failure. Just after doing some web surfing the Toshiba’s screen suddenly froze; I could not get any response from keyboard inputs so I had to perform a hard shutdown. Thankfully, I managed to boot to the disk again and retrieved most of my important data before the next crash occurred. The sound that the mechanical hard disk failure made gave me nightmares! How was I going to fix this situation before classes resumed and all the assignments started pouring in?

My first consideration was to simply get a new 2.5″ notebook hard disk and reinstall Windows XP from my recovery CDs. However, after much convincing from family members I decided to get a new notebook altogether since the Toshiba Satellite was already 7 years old and was starting to show its age in areas other than hard disk performance. Coincidentally, BestBuy was having a special sale on their Gateway P-7811FX line of notebooks, which was a steal for the high-end components included. Unfortunately, I would not have been able to get it to Canada and ordering a Dell XPS notebook would take 12-15 business days to be delivered. After a lot of research on the notebooks at FutureShop I paid a visit to one of their local outlets and found the perfect replacement for a sub-$1600 price. With tax the final price came up to about $1900, which was reasonable compared to the budget I had in mind, so I purchased an HP Pavilion DV7-1034ca notebook.

“Notebook” is a relative term here for the Pavilion DV7 since it is more of a desktop replacement. You may be wondering why my budget was so high: The reason for this was partially due to recommendation from family members to get the best notebook I could get for the price that would take me through the rest of my undergraduate and graduate careers. Additionally, portability is not very important to me since I rarely take my notebook anywhere except when travelling overseas. I also do a lot of Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator work, a bit of website management and some gaming so the graphics card, CPU, hard disk space and RAM were important components to consider. The Pavilion DV7 has some of the latest technology components today that I felt were the perfect combination, although the screen resolution could have been higher.

So today, I am writing this entry from my new HP Pavilion DV7-1034ca notebook while my old Toshiba Satellite 1800-S204 is taking an eternal nap in my notebook case. The Toshiba served me well, which I am more than grateful for, and I am sure that the new Pavilion will be just as good. Look out for my mini-review of the HP Pavilion DV7 coming soon!

One Response

[…] new notebook: HP Pavilion DV7-1034ca In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that my old Toshiba Satellite 1800-S204 crashed which left me in quite a tough situation. Fortunately, I was due for a new notebook, but I had not […]